Bill Boyarsky page at LA Observed

LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky retired from the Los Angeles Times after serving as national political writer, City-County Bureau chief, city editor and columnist. A former vice president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, he lectures in journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and writes columns for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and Truthdig.com. He is the author of several books including "Californiaâ€™s Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh, Power Politics" and the "Art of the Possible," published by University of California Press. He lives in Westwood. Email

Mayor Eric Garcetti and several city council members have decided that the issue of a high- rise Los Angeles is too hot to handle and want to throw it into the bottomless pit that is the city hall bureaucracy.

As a television moderator and a city councilman, the late Bill Rosendahl was fiercely dedicated to good government and clean politics. Even more important, he was dedicated to bringing people together.

“Homelessness is a problem that involves thousands of people and requires a massive response but at the end of the day it’s really about one person at a time,“ said Miguel Santana, Los Angeles’ city administrative officer.

The negatives and positives of a changing Los Angeles were on display Monday when the chairman of the city council’s budget and finance committee spoke to lawyers, lobbyists, union leaders and other city hall aficionados.

The best part of Austin Beutner’s talk at Columbia was his praise for experienced journalists and his appreciation of the skill their trade requires to cover complex institutions such as Los Angeles city hall.

The wrong-headed decision by the five Los Angeles County supervisors to consolidate power in their own hands comes at the worst possible time, just as the county is facing a homeless crisis of epic proportions.

From Los Angeles city hall to the county building up the hill, African American political activists are thinking about the mayor's race and the future of black representation on the board of supervisors.

The best place to watch baseball in Los Angeles is not Dodger Stadium. It’s Jackie Robinson Stadium, the small, elegant home of the UCLA baseball Bruins.
Unfortunately for the university, the ballpark occupies 10 acres of the 387-acre Veterans Administration health facility in West Los Angeles, land reserved for housing and treating veterans.

Richard J. Riordan, in his book “The Mayor”, tells of the tragedies in his life and of his extra-marital affairs, divorces and drinking, adding a very human touch to his story of the eight successful years he served as mayor of Los Angeles.

“The time to act is now,” said the LA 2020 Commission in its report last year urging big changes for Los Angeles city government. Not so fast, said City Council President Herb Wesson, who created the commission.

The death of my friend Al Martinez, the Los Angeles Times great columnist, took me back more than a half century when Al and I first worked together at the Oakland Tribune, which he memorialized in his book “The Last City Room.”

By listening carefully to the new Los Angeles Times publisher at Town Hall Los Angeles Wednesday, it was possible to get a sense of Austin Beutner. It was also possible to see where he may be taking the 133-year-old paper.

On Wednesday, Austin Beutner, the new publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, will, hopefully, shed light on the future of the paper when he speaks to civic leaders at Town Hall Los Angeles. Here are some questions he could be asked.

The big question is this: Did all that labor money in Sheila Kuehl's campaign put her in county employee union pockets? The same goes for the other new supervisor, Hilda Solis, also elected with labor support.

A conversation with City Atty. Mike Feuer is a trip through the nitty gritty of city government, starting with dangerous sidewalks and including graffiti prevention, medical marijuana regulation and aid to prostitutes who want a better life.

Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Art Center and its old industrial surroundings is a dramatic example of how rail transit lines are changing the appearance, the employment and residential style of a Southland shaped by the automobile

In an audacious move to bypass the county supervisors, Latino leaders, public policy reformers and civil libertarians are backing state legislation that would give a judge the power to expand the five-member board.

I asked Junior State high school students how many read newspapers. I expected few hands would be raised in the Los Angeles Times community room. Wrong. Well over a dozen--maybe more--signaled they read those old-fashioned print communications.

The latest version of the mayoral web site, Data LA, is greatly improved from its shaky first edition. Even modestly computer-savvy Angelenos get enough information to come to their own conclusions about the mayor and the rest of city government.

An irony of Los Angeles politics is the way homeowner groups on the Westside—that bastion of open government advocates—sign confidential agreements with developers to support controversial projects in exchange for large amounts of money.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors election will bring new faces to the powerful body. But it’s unlikely to change the board’s opposition to creating a district where a second Latino could be elected to the board.

Garcetti at Town Hall was like a personable CEO being interviewed on CNBC, earnestly pitching his company’s products and bright long-range future, brushing off a more immediate and less pleasant matter.

It’s not easy to figure out Mayor Eric Garcetti’s grand plan for Los Angeles, or even if he has one. His state of the city speech Thursday didn’t help. "It starts with modern technology,” the mayor said, and then sort of left us hanging.

There are serious questions about Mayor Eric Garcetti’s appointment of former Department of Water and Power General Manager David Wiggs as assistant general manager in charge of the public utility’s electric system.

It was interesting to hear how City Controller Ron Galperin arranged to have Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Atty. Mike Feuer join him for a press conference last month blasting the head of the big union representing Department of Water and Power employees.

Waiting for a train at Metro Center Station in downtown Los Angeles—the platform full of Blue Line and Expo Line riders--I wondered at the LA 2020 Commission’s cool dismissal of a mass transit system that is growing into a real asset .

Pity Mayor Eric Garcetti. Judging from the news coverage, Bill de Blasio of New York is now America’s most famous mayor while the mayor of the second most populous city is toiling away with dwindling attention from the news media.

I went out to Hollywood Park Sunday for one of the last horse racing days before it is torn down. If the developers’ dreams come true, the famous race track will be replaced with about 3,000 homes, more than 600,000 square feet of retail and a 300-room hotel.

Among the many accomplishments of Mark Lacter, the respected journalist who died last week, was his mastery of a now-essential journalism skill---an ability to move seamlessly from long, deeply reported pieces to punchy blog items.

The announcement that Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, is planning to lay off almost 700 employees and centralize important business operations is bad news not only to the workers but to Times readers.

When Mayor Eric Garcetti was interviewing department heads—deciding which ones would be dumped or retained—he noticed how they reacted when he talked about introducing new technology to stodgy old city hall.

Controller Ron Galperin is determined to use computers to analyze the massive amounts of data in City Hall as is done by sports teams, retail marketers, political campaigns, the National Security Agency and cutting edge political and sports analysts like Nate Silver.

Something important is happening in Los Angeles County’s fascinating ethnic politics and it could result in greater Latino and Asian American representation on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in the next few years.

I drove over to the Van Nuys city hall Friday to see my friend June Sale honored by the Los Angeles City Council for her decades helping children. It was a fine event both for June and for the way it called attention to her vital programs.

The latest poll, which finds Dennis Zine ahead in the controller’s race and Mike Feuer leading for city attorney, also shows that half the voters don’t think Los Angeles is heading in the right direction.

Only someone intrigued by the finer points of the politics of education could have figured out the differences between the overly cautious mayoral candidates Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel at their debate Tuesday night.

Having watched filmmakers Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor scramble for funding for a documentary on the late Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, I was glad to see they have received a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant that will allow them to finish the project by next January.

On my way to the courthouse for some interviews Tuesday, I glanced across the plaza at the county administration building and thought of two terrific county supervisors, Edmund D. Edelman and Kenneth Hahn.

The winner of Tuesday night’s mayoral debate was the moderator, Professor Fernando J. Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles and a longtime analyst of local politics.

Michael Berman, a fiercely combative political consultant, has always been a secretive sort, especially when it comes to talking to reporters. I can testify to that. He hasn’t spoken to me since August 1988.

You’ve heard of the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan ticket. But I bet the idea of a Ryan-Brad Sherman ticket never occurred to you. It didn’t occur to me until I covered the debate Wednesday night between Reps. Sherman and Howard Berman.

As mid morning traffic on I-405 built up, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood amid the construction work on the Mulholland Bridge Thursday and celebrated his biggest accomplishment, congressional approval of the America Fast Forward program.

Rep. Howard Berman figures a substantial turnout in November—more than doubling the size of the paltry June primary vote--will push him ahead of Rep. Brad Sherman, who outpolled him in that San Fernando Valley election. Sherman's side doesn't agree.

One of the best examples of why government doesn’t work is the $7.5 billion in fines and penalties for traffic and criminal offenses that remain uncollected while courtrooms are closed and employees fired.

On the last day of a London vacation, I took a tour of the 2012 Olympics site, drawn there by a feeling that I wanted to see in person the venue I’d be watching on television later this summer. I wondered, as I always do, whether there were any lessons for Los Angeles here.

Marc Nathanson had reached the $2,500 federal limit on money he could contribute to his candidate in the San Fernando Valley’s 30th Congressional District, Rep. Howard Berman. So he started a super PAC allowing him and others to give much more.

What was fascinating about USC’s From the Ashes conference was the youth of most of the participants. Twenty years after the 1992 riot, a new generation is taking over the never-ending job of bringing prosperity and racial peace to Los Angeles.

An overlooked aspect of Los Angeles’ fight over drawing new City Council district lines is whether the city power brokers—Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and council members—will stir up racial animosity and discriminate against Latinos with their redistricting proposal.

If the last few days are any indication, the Jewish Journal debate starring Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman at Temple Judea in Tarzana Tuesday night should be pretty intense. A third debater in the contest for the West San Fernando Valley congressional seat is Republican Mark Reed.

Parents have won partial restoration of federal poverty funds for 23 schools in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside. Many of the schools are in middle class neighborhoods but have substantial numbers of poor students.

Although Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky didn’t shed much light on whether he will run for mayor, he gave a scathing and knowledgeable critique of L.A. city hall and indicated what he might do if he ran the place.

Filmmakers, equipped with visual and story telling skills, are tackling the job of exploring the personalities, issues and politics that have made the State Capitol and Los Angeles City Hall so important to the state.

“So I ask myself,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, “how do you get out of this?”
The veteran Westside congressman was talking about how to avoid a battle in the San Fernando Valley between his friend Rep. Howard Berman and Rep, Brad Sherman.

Do Latinos tend to vote only for Latinos? Do non-Latinos generally vote against Hispanic political candidates? Those racially charged questions are behind the struggle over new Los Angeles County supervisorial districts.

At lunch at Langers, Tim Rutten and I discussed his layoff from the Los Angeles Times after four decades.I thought it was stupid, wrong and unfair, another sign of how the paper was destroying itself so fast that soon there would be little left. Rutten, of course, agreed.

Greg Nelson was chief aide to then City Councilman Joel Wachs, who stiffened the city’s back during negotiations over Staples Center in the mid 1990s and improved the deal. He has thoughts on the current stadium proposal

So many questions, so little time. That just about describes the situation when the Los Angeles City Council meets June 29 to finally look behind the curtain of secrecy surrounding the downtown National Football League stadium proposal.

As the late broadcaster Chick Hearn used to say when the Lakers clinched a victory, ''You can put this one in the refrigerator. The door's closed, the light's out, the eggs are cooling, the butter's getting hard and the Jell-O is jiggling.''

I watched Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas use an imaginative Internet and telephone tool to build support for his vision of the Crenshaw light rail line. Is it good enough to beat Zev Yaroslavsky?

In a time when the smart money has written off the state, an excellent and timely documentary, “California State of Mind—the Legacy of Pat Brown,” recalls the prosperous past and gives us a bit of hope for the problems confronting the late governor’s son, Jerry Brown.

I visited what should now be called MLB Stadium at Chavez Ravine. The name on the ballpark is still Dodger Stadium, but a change is order after Major League Baseball took over the Dodgers from Frank McCourt.

Some of the city’s sharpest political organizers can be found at Hamilton High School. They used e-mail and Facebook over the weekend and got 600 students and Times columnist Steve Lopez to the campus Monday in a campaign against teacher layoffs. Many a paid political hack would sell his or her soul to the devil (again) for such a coup.

My breakfast meeting at the Homegirl Cafe was delayed for an hour. I decided to use the time for a walk through nearby Chinatown. As often happens with me, it was a walk through history—L.A’s and my own.

When State Controller John Chiang sends his auditors into the unfathomable recesses of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, he hopes the city officials will not engage in their usual practice of hiding bad news.

Among the good news coming out of Sacramento this week was the report that Gov. Jerry Brown wants to eliminate the hundreds of redevelopment agencies that suck money from the schools for the benefit of land developers.

Although Los Angeles was largely shaped by the automobile, mass transit is becoming the biggest force in building the future Los Angeles. That was one of the major themes Wednesday night at a planning forum held in the old Bullocks Wilshire building, an early symbol of auto-mad L.A.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s fight to clean up the air in the heavily polluted Los Angeles harbor—stymied in the courts---has shifted to Congress where his labor and environmental allies have more clout.

Victor Valle's valuable book "City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California" tells much about the two billionaires fighting each other for an NFL franchise--and their connection to that infamous San Gabriel Valley city.

With city hall news full of minor malfeasance, it is surprising to report that something positive is actually happening. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s 30/10 transit plan is moving toward Congressional approval even though progress is about as slow as a Wilshire bus during rush hour.

The Israeli attack on the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza has become an issue in the Los Angeles County coastal district congressional contest between Democratic Rep. Jane Harman and her more liberal challenger, Marcy Winograd.

The Mar Vista recreation center overflowed with political addicts for a candidates’ night for the 53rd Assembly district and the hottest Los Angeles congressional race, between Democratic Rep. Jane Harman and her primary challenger, Marcy Winograd.

Bill, Your blog... about the library's path to success for children of immigrants reminds me of my own experience with LAPL.... .I grew up in an orphanage, and, basically, lived at the local Palms branch...

After Independence Day, Los Angeles city libraries will drop a day from their schedules. “There will be 100 layoffs from the library and this will trigger a reduction from six days a week to five days a week,” Martin Gomez, the city librarian, told me.

When my wife Nancy and I wrote our book “Backroom Politics” in the 1970s, we explained the puzzling maze of boards and commissions that local politicians create to confuse their constituents. The Expo light rail line is a perfect example of what we wrote about.

Should low-paid truck drivers shoulder the cost of cleaning up pollution at Los Angeles harbor? That’s the question before a federal court this week in a case that is major test of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s harbor anti-pollution plan

Behind the big fight over power rates is the electrical workers union, determined to make sure it has command over the thousands of new jobs that will be created in the next decade in the solar-renewable energy industry.

Maybe Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made the reporters wait in the blazing hot Department of Water and Power plaza for a half hour Monday because he wanted to prove there is enough sunshine to make Los Angeles a solar powered city.

In proposing big increases in electrical bills, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seems to ignore the terrible hardships the Great Recession is imposing on the working people of Los Angeles. The increase is a highly regressive tax hike hurting those hit by the recession.

Amazingly, the city community building meeting room was filled with anti-spending cut protestors at the inconvenient hour of 6 p.m. Wednesday, and the stars of the evening were the students from Lincoln High School.

Many injustices were challenged and overcome in court by Ramona Ripston, who is retiring as executive director of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, and the excellent legal team she assembled.

I spent humiliating years as an ethics commissioner watching the big spenders dominate city hall. So I was especially happy to see the spenders humiliated in the recent 2nd District City Council election.

One of the last of Doug Ring’s many good deeds was a visit to the Los Angeles Times editorial board with members of Housing LA, an organization advocating affordable housing for the thousands of residents being forced out of the city by high rents.

As newspapers and television pull back from investigative reporting, foundations and other organizations are beginning to fill the void. One of the most interesting is Accountable California, a project of Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union.

The flames of the Station fire will be blamed for the floods that may follow in the denuded San Gabriel Mountains. But let’s place the blame where it belongs, on land development, acquiescent local officials, and a tax structure that subsidizes hillside building.

School superintendent Ramon Cortines'̻ schedule for implementing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school reform plan is either a great way of getting parents involved or a classic example of bureaucratic delay.

In the small world of Westside politics, activists hold certain truths to be self-evident. Development is bad because it increases traffic. Billboards are bad because they’re…billboards. And Proposition B, the solar initiative on the March 3 ballot, is so awful that there are no words to describe it, not even the powerful words of Ron Kaye.

Despite all the questions, I think solar Proposition B is a good plan. Solar is perfect for sunny L.A. Green industry is the wave of the future. It’s smart to have our public power utility do the work. It’s good that DWP union workers will install the installations. We need more union jobs, which strengthen the economy by expanding the middle class.

The double afflictions of foreclosure and job loss drew a crowd filling the San Fernando High School auditorium Sunday for a rally put on by One LA, a grassroots group with activists from churches and synagogues throughout the city.

Some USC journalism professors are raising questions about a proposal for the Annenberg School for Communication to sign a $3 million contract to help American University in Dubai create a journalism and communication school.

A big test of Mayor Antonio’s commitment to liberal causes will be how hard he pushes for his plan to require developers to make room in their high- end projects for low and moderate income Los Angeles residents.

The unspoken question in the runoff between Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas is how much influence the winning candidate will allow the unions in negotiating the reopening of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center, which once served thousands of poor people.

The dream of home ownership has long been part of life on 92nd Street and similar South Los Angeles working class neighborhoods. But making the dream come true has never been easy-- not more than a half century ago when the area was mostly white and not today when it is African American and Latino.

How much more can be dished out to the beleaguered journalists of the Los Angeles Times?. It has to apologize for a story based on what appears to have been phony documents. Then, there are the musings and rantings of the owner, Sam Zell.

The City Council puts off a decision on a controversial proposal to require strict financial disclosure for neighborhood council members. The neighborhood councils and the City Ethics Commission didn't like the idea and the City Council listened.

Former commission president Ed Guthman is just the kind of person I wish elected officials would appoint to the ethics commission--independent, informed and deeply committed to the mission of this important regulatory agency.

A USC symposium honoring the late Frank del Olmo, a highly respected Los Angeles Times journalist, produced some gloomy thoughts about Latino news coverage in his old paper and the rest of the news media.

The mayor and the council should think about the kind of Los Angeles we want. We don't want a city where the working class and middle class are forced out. If city hall is unconcerned, maybe Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who does care, can take his fight to the ballot, as he did several years ago with a successful measure that imposed development controls that the mayor and the council had refused.

A study commission notes how city hall was was supposed to provide support and encouragement to the volunteers on the neighborhood councils. Instead, the commission said, the staff spends its time on reviewing the councils' bylaws, untangling their election disputes and going over the neighborhood council finances in a bean counter fashion.That's city hall. You can't get in trouble by being a bean counter.

The imminent closing of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, one of the worst health disasters in Los Angeles County history, is a painful illustration of why we need national health insurance, Medicare for everybody.

Our gag rule is a big reason why many people consider the ethics commission irrelevant. When allegations of ethical violations are splashed on the news and are being discussed from the harbor to the Valley, ethics commissioners should be able to say more than “no comment.”

Showing they are buddies—or conspirators—when it comes to something as dear to their hearts as campaign money, Democratic and Republican state legislators are sneaking through a bill that will gut laws in Los Angeles and other cities limiting campaign contributions.

Spare me from the “slippery slope,” one of the trickiest phrases in politics.I learned that the hard way at this month’s City Ethics Commission meeting when I came up with what I thought was a great way of handling the campaign contribution accusations our staff brought against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The city hall maneuvering over full public financing of Los Angeles elections is entering a new and muddy phase. Muddy to me, anyway, but what do I know? I’m just an ethics commissioner and we’re about as welcome in city hall backrooms as an advocate of democracy is in Putin’s Kremlin.

Writing regulations is pretty tedious. But victory goes to those with the patience to sit through the process—a good lesson for an ex- reporter still suffering from a journalist’s short attention span.

To keep faith with its readers, the Los Angeles Times needs to put all its resources into an investigation of what’s been going on in the Current section and the editorial pages, now tainted by the conduct of editor Andres Martinez.

When my flight was cancelled recently, I was immersed in the foul Los Angeles International Airport for four hours, sitting in the cramped terminal seats, eating tasteless tamales, struggling to buy papers in the small, crowded shop. Finally, I flew to the clean, bright and welcoming Southwest terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

We ethics commissioners finally disposed of the thing. At least I think so. The argument went way over my head. It was so nuanced, disputatious and legalistic, in fact, that I am sure I have missed important nuances in writing this report.

When I wrote about how much I disliked the subsidies and secrecy involved in three big L.A. development projects, a reader criticized me for liking them. I figured I’d better try again: I don’t like the taxpayer subsidies and the secrecy.

What the Grand Avenue, Staples Center-L.A. Live and the airport "development" zone have in common is that they demand enough government funding to permit the risk adverse private sector to take a chance. This is not the market economy. This is what the Chinese Communists are doing as they lure massive private investment to pretty up the place for the Olympics.

I don’t blame Thomas Mauk, Orange County’s chief executive, for changing his mind and refusing the job of chief administrative officer of Los Angeles County While the parking is good, the building is ugly and the bosses are terrible.

Valley Vote lives. The secessionists meet with an intensity and intelligence the city council should copy, always guided by their anti government populist views, loyal to the gospel of rebellion as preached by Ron Kaye, the take-no-crap editor of the Daily News.

We at the ethics commission have embarked on an impossible mission. We are formally sending our proposal for full public financing of city political campaigns to the city council and I don't think it has much of a chance.

The new Times guys in town celebrated the paper's 125th birthday at the Hollywood Roosevelt and the paper got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. The new publisher was too awed, too much the visitor to town trying hard to impress. He didn't understand that the star is not an Oscar or a place in the baseball Hall of Fame.

The trouble with settlement deals, like the one in Los Angeles firefighter Tennie Pierce's case, is that they permit city council members to discuss hot topics while being shielded from public scrutiny.

It's odd how things disappear into the City Hall abyss.That's true of many issues but one occurred to me while I was walking along Westwood Boulevard, toward Wilshire, early in the morning and observed some of the Westside's homeless rousing themselves for another day on the streets. Didn't I read that City Hall was going to do something about the homeless?

Asking the Los Angeles city attorney for advice is like a middle schooler asking her parents if she can go to Rosa Rita beach for the weekend with friends.The answer is No! No! Didn't your hear me? I said NO!